Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Bill

Lord Khan of Burnley Excerpts

2nd reading
Friday 21st April 2023 Lords Chamber

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

My Lords, I am aware that I am the penultimate speaker in the last debate on a Friday, so I will be as concise as possible. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Best, for sponsoring the Bill in this House and all noble Lords for their very informative and eloquent contributions. I particularly thank my noble friend Lady Warwick of Undercliffe for all her work in this area when she was the chair of the National Housing Federation, and for recently securing a debate in Grand Committee on supported housing and homelessness.

The Opposition welcome this Bill and I thank everyone involved at all stages of the Bill for progressing it. We on these Benches regret how long we have had to wait for legislation to address exploitation and profiteering at the hands of rogue exempt accommodation operators, and the fact that progress in this area has been dependent on the ongoing success of Bob Blackman MP in the Private Member’s Bill ballot initiated in the other place. Unfortunately, there are loopholes in the current system that have been open to exploitation. There is evidence that unscrupulous landlords have been capitalising on those loopholes and claiming uncapped housing benefits to make a profit. In fact, my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage was just telling me that an accommodation provider was charging up to £10,000 a week, which is scandalous.

The Bill will create a minimum standard for type and condition of premises, as well as for the care and support provided. There has been a clear correlation between high concentrations of exempt accommodation and antisocial behaviour and crime. We support the measures in the Bill. It is a means to enhance local authorities’ oversight of supported housing and to enable them to drive up standards in their area. As we have long argued, a robust framework of national standards for the sector is essential.

Some 153,700 households in Great Britain were housed in exempt accommodation in May 2021, but the lack of data means it could be much more widespread than even that figure suggests. This point was made in the other place, as well as by my noble friend Lord Campbell-Savours. We need a better understanding of the issue; that will be driven by increased data. I look forward to hearing how the Government plan to achieve this.

Furthermore, we would like to see new planning powers to allow local authorities to proactively manage their local supported housing markets; enhanced provisions for national monitoring and oversight; an expanded list of new banning order offences and establishing the evaluation and improvement notice procedures, so that local authorities can drive up standards without implementing a full licensing regime. We remain of the view that those suggestions have merit and believe that they will need to be revisited if the Bill fails to deliver in the way that we hope it will.

We encourage the Minister to give serious consideration to giving local authorities powers equivalent to those in Part 1 of the Housing Act 2004, which provides for the housing health and safety rating system, hazard awareness notices and improvement notice procedures. As the Minister will know, outside large urban areas, most local authorities have only a handful of officers, if that, in their private rented sector teams. We need to ensure that there is a suite of options short of licensing that will allow small authorities to bear down on the problem.

My final point is related to local authority resources, a point the noble Lord, Lord Best, made in his introduction, along with other noble Lords. The Bill will place additional requirements on local authorities to carry out reviews of supported exempt accommodation in their districts and to publish supported housing strategies. In addition, authorities which believe it necessary to adopt licensing schemes and are in a position to do so will face additional cost as a result. My noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage raised the issue of adult and social care funding going to upper-tier authorities in two-tier system and there is no requirement for funding to be passed down to housing authorities or district councils, where most housing issues are dealt with.

In the other place, the Minister confirmed a new burdens assessment would be made. Can I probe the scope of that confirmation further? We are concerned that local authorities ultimately may not receive any support for ongoing costs, particularly in relation to licensing schemes. We would welcome some assurances from the Minister that the net additional costs of any new burdens arising from this Bill will be fully and properly funded. If not, how do the Government believe the ongoing costs can be made self-financing?

Those specific concerns aside, we very much welcome the fact that the Bill is being debated in the Chamber today and wish it a smooth passage through its remaining stages and on to the statute book. It will undoubtedly help to put rogue exempt accommodation operators out of business and better enable local authorities to drive up supported housing standards in their areas. As the honourable Member for Harrow East, Bob Blackman, said,

“it will improve the lives of some of the most vulnerable people in our society”—[Official Report, Commons, 18/11/22; col. 970.]

and bring relief to communities struggling to cope with the impact of concentrated numbers of badly run exempt accommodation properties. We recognise that today is a significant, important step forward and we are pleased to give the Bill our support. Well done team Blackman and Best. The message today from this House is loud and clear: the time in which the rogue landlords have been able to exploit those vulnerable people is rapidly coming to an end.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities (Baroness Scott of Bybrook) (Con)]

My Lords, I thank my noble friend—he is not really my noble friend, but he is my noble friend—Lord Best for those kind words. There was no way that I was not going to be here as the Minister to support this Bill because, for me, it is one of the most important Bills we have seen coming through for quite a long time. I thank him for introducing the debate and congratulate him on the sponsorship of what, as I said, is an extremely important Bill. I thank other noble Lords for their support of the Bill today which, I am pleased to say, the Government are also supporting.

I also thank and pay tribute to my honourable friend the Member for Harrow East for his tireless work in making sure that the very important matter of poor-quality supported housing is now placed before this House.

I will begin by setting out the context for the measures contained in the Bill. Supported housing is home to some of the most vulnerable members of our society. People with disabilities and mental ill-health, survivors of domestic abuse, older people and people experiencing homelessness all rely on this important type of housing. Supported housing is more than just a home: it also plays a vital role in delivering better life outcomes and greater independence to those in need by providing care, support and supervision alongside accommodation.

Many excellent providers of supported housing operate in this sector, but I am very sorry to say that there are also rogues. These unscrupulous people are exploiting the system to the detriment of the very vulnerable people it is supposed to support, and at considerable cost to the taxpayer. Let us not forget that the financial benefit gained by these rogues rests on abusing the rules in housing benefit. Ministers at the Department for Work and Pensions agree that it is totally unacceptable that large amounts of public money are being paid out in housing benefit to fund this poor provision.

Before I go on to the Bill itself, I will briefly set out the action that the Government are taking to tackle the issues of poor quality in the supported housing sector. In October 2020 we published the national statement of expectations setting out the Government’s vision for the planning, commissioning and delivery of good-quality accommodation in supported housing. We also launched the supported housing pilots—which I think the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, brought up. Between October 2020 and September 2021, we funded five local authorities with a total of £5.4 million to explore ways of improving quality and value for money in the sector, particularly in exempt accommodation.

We published the independent evaluation of the pilots in April 2022 and have continued to build on the success of this initiative. Our ongoing supported housing improvement programme is backed by £20 million of funding and is helping 26 local authorities tackle quality issues in some of the most affected areas of the country, but we realise that we must go further. The evaluation of the pilots was clear that without providing additional powers to local authorities, our ability to fix these issues is limited. That is why the Government announced their intention to regulate the supported housing sector in a Written Ministerial Statement in March last year.

This Government’s priority is to protect the welfare of their most vulnerable citizens, and the Bill includes powers to bring in the crucial regulation that is required. We are determined to drive up quality in supported housing and drive out unscrupulous providers. Driving up standards is critical given the harmful consequences that the worst of this appalling accommodation can have for the vulnerable people living there and the damaging impacts we have seen on communities blighted by anti-social behaviour.

I will now move on to the measures set out in the Bill. The supported housing sector is increasingly complex, cutting across tenures, including both social housing and private housing supplied by charities and voluntary bodies. Given this complexity, it is right that the Government should seek information and advice about supported housing from experts. The Bill therefore creates an advisory panel, which will be established within a year of the Bill becoming law.

During the passage of the Bill in the other place there was much discussion of the paucity of data available to government on supported housing, and we have heard that again today, particularly from the noble Lord, Lord Khan of Burnley, and the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley. We recognise the lack of data on supported housing; it is crucial that we make improvements in this area. I am pleased to say that we already have research under way to provide an estimate of the size, and importantly the cost, of the supported housing sector across Great Britain, as well as estimates of future demand. The Department for Work and Pensions has also made changes to its systems to improve the data it holds on housing benefit claims.

In addition to those measures, the Bill places a new duty on local housing authorities in England to produce supported housing strategies. These strategies will assess the current provision of supported housing and will require authorities to forecast future need in local communities. The more information and data we have, the better-informed decisions we can make about supported housing now and into the future.

For the first time, there will be a set of national standards for support: the national supported housing standards. Currently, the only requirement set out in housing benefit case law is that the support being provided is “more than minimal”—this is simply not good enough. These national standards will cover the type and quality of accommodation being used to deliver supported housing, as well as the quality of support that residents receive. The standards will apply to all supported housing providers in England and will be enforced through local authority-led licensing schemes. Licensing will apply to districts designated by either the Secretary of State or the local authority.

The Bill also sets out what conditions will need to be met in order to obtain a licence. These may refer to the standard and the use of the accommodation, the requirement for a support needs assessment, the provision of care, support and supervision, as well as meeting the national standards. Penalties will rightly apply where licensing conditions are not met, or where supported housing is operating without a licence in a designated licensing area. Powers in the Bill allow us to make provision for offences and penalties in the licensing regulations.

The Government are aware of the potential for unintended consequences for people in need of supported housing services. Crucially, the Bill places a duty on the Secretary of State to consult on the key measures that I have set out before making any regulations. This includes a requirement to seek the views of statutory consultees. Stakeholders can be reassured that the Government are determined to work with them to understand the impact of these measures and to ensure that any risks are understood before proceeding. But we are clear that the purpose of these changes is to drive out rogue providers, which is paramount.

Further measures in the Bill include a requirement to review the effect of the licensing regime after three years, to consider whether a change in planning law is warranted. This was brought up by a number of noble Lords, and I assure them that we will review that. A change to homelessness legislation will ensure that anyone who finds themselves forced to leave supported housing because it does not comply with the national standards will not be intentionally homeless. My noble friend Lord Young of Cookham brought up the important issue of social housing data on the demand for supported housing that is not held centrally. We are commissioning that research because we need to know what the effect will be once we put these measures in place. We need to know the current and future demands, because we cannot have people being made homeless unintentionally through the Bill.

As I said, the Bill also requires local authorities to produce strategic plans, as we heard, and they will therefore forecast the need in their areas. In order to produce those plans, they will have to know the baseline for accommodation at that time. Local authority providers and the Government are there to ensure that supported housing needs can and will be met.

My noble friend also raised the issue of discharging obligations and powers in the Bill. First of all, as I said, the advisory panel will be set up as soon as possible after the Bill becomes law and will be an important part of ensuring that these actions are delivered. My noble friend brought up national standards, and, as I said, the Government have already started work with stakeholders across the housing sector to develop the standards. As far as the licensing is concerned, the Government will consult on measures to enforce the standards, and, as I said, we intend to introduce a licensing regime, as is set out in the Bill.

A number of noble Lords brought up the issue of the Select Committee report. The Government are considering the areas that the Select Committee highlighted, and we will publish a response in due course. We know that the Bill alone is not enough, so we are committed to taking forward further action, if needed—first of all, to get rid of rogue landlords, and, most importantly, to keep driving up the quality of supported housing.

The noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, brought up the really important issue of the impact on good providers. There are some fantastic providers out there; I know that personally, because my daughter is in supported housing, as I have mentioned before. The Government are determined to avoid any unintended consequences for good providers of supported housing. We are already working with stakeholders on the detail, and, as I said, we will consult before committing to the detail of the licensing scheme and the standards.

The cost to local authorities will be assessed. I know that this is important, quite rightly, if we are putting new burdens on local authorities—and this is a big burden, as well as an important one. Costs will be assessed through the new burdens process, as usual. I hope that response puts noble Lords’ minds at rest on that subject.

The noble Lord, Lord Campbell-Savours, brought up a number of issues, most of which will be covered by the 12-week consultation, but I am more than happy to look at Hansard and go through his questions to make sure he gets a written answer, as that is what he asked for. We will make sure that copies of that will be in the Library.

The noble Baroness, Lady Warwick of Undercliffe, discussed the costs of the licences and the exemptions from licences. As I said, the Government will consult on the whole scheme. Is important that local authorities and other stakeholders all get involved in that consultation, because it will be a better scheme if the people actually working in the sector get involved before we completely set it up.

Those are my responses to all the questions. There were a lot of questions on funding. The Government are absolutely aware of this and are considering and doing research on the costs of these services for the future and for this type of accommodation. I feel quite strongly—as I know the noble Lord, Lord Best, does, too—that this is part of the continuum of keeping people in their own homes with dignity for as long as possible in their lives, so this will be an increasingly important housing sector in this country for people we look after in some parts of their lives.

In closing, I will repeat that there are many excellent providers of supported housing, who are determined to provide an excellent service for their residents. Those good providers have nothing to fear. As I said, my officials are already working with stakeholders to design a scheme that will drive out the rogues but enable good-quality supported housing to continue to be delivered as it is now.

We know that time is of the essence, and the Government have committed to laying regulations within 18 months of the Bill becoming law. As I said, I am enormously grateful to my noble friend Lord Best—I still call him my noble friend—for sponsoring the Bill, and to my honourable friend the Member for Harrow East for his work in the other place. The Government are committed to stamping out the practice of rogue providers exploiting vulnerable people, at considerable cost to the taxpayer. The Bill is a crucial step forward in ensuring that people receive good-quality support in a market free from unscrupulous actors.

[Lord Khan of Burnley (Lab)]

Before the noble Baroness sits down, I want to ask about the issue that my noble friend Lady Taylor of Stevenage has raised previously and I raised today about passporting funds, where in two-tier authorities higher authorities passport funds to housing authorities and districts. Can the noble Baroness get back to us on that?

[Baroness Scott of Bybrook (Con)]

I think that that will be part of the overall research into how the system works and where the money is. It was interesting that, even at the Select Committee, a provider said that there is money in the system but it is not being used correctly. We need to have the data on this to look at all those issues.